Monday, 31 December 2018

And instead of giving money to highly questionable ones, the British State used to own a cross-Channel ferry company, which also went to Ireland, to the Channel Islands, and to the Isle of Wight. It ought to do so again.

Most of the MPs in Jeremy Corbyn's party, never mind on the purportedly more patriotic other side, would come out in hives at any such suggestion. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

"I voted for Callaghan even though he had turned to monetarism and sent in troops against strikers, and I voted for Blair even though he had turned to PFI and sent in troops against much of the world, but I cannot and will not vote for Corbyn"?

I don't believe you. You are so unconvincing that the 77th Brigade should cashier you, and the Integrity Initiative should demand its money back.

The IGCSE was supposed to have been harder than the GCSE, meaning that people with rich parents must have been cleverer than everyone else. Apparently. I cannot follow that, either. But question these people, and they just say the same thing more and more loudly until you give in. Then they think that they have won the argument.

Anyway, along came Michael Gove and supposedly made GCSEs harder, meaning that suddenly the IGCSEs were being set to rich thickies who had to be in school somewhere, but who could never have coped with the academic rigour of the comprehensive sector, its massive popularity confirmed by the unexpected loss of an overall majority on the part of the party that had hinted at bringing back its hated predecessor from well before most of present population was born.

This year's rich thickies, however, must be entirely unrelated to last year's master race.

Yes, of course it is all rubbish. Gove's silly GCSE numbers business will not last five years, but that will still make it his most lasting legacy, as GCSEs themselves are Margaret Thatcher's. Those who were 16 during these few, strange years are going to spend the rest of their lives converting their incomprehensible "levels" back into grades A* to G.

We all know that there never was a Gatwick drone. But then, the Skripals never died, either. Some weapon of mass destruction, that.

Yet the British Embassy in Moscow has lost so many staff that it is now barely viable, the British Consulate-General in St Petersburg has been closed, and the previously thriving British Council has been kicked out of Russia.

Now, though, you must never, ever mention the ridiculous pretext on which these acts of self-harm were inflicted. Once the biggest story in the world, it has become as if it never happened. The consequences, however, are still very much in place.

Both that pretext and those acts were insufficiently criticised by Jeremy Corbyn at the time, and they were egged on with demands for all-out nuclear war by 85 per cent of his party's MPs, on whose own logic Trident is therefore no deterrent at all, but who do of course have form, having obscenely cheered a war to the echo after Hilary Benn's best-forgotten speech on Syria.

Expect the same reaction to the impending ban on private drone ownership, and to the revival of the long list of "security" measures for which most Labour and almost all Conservative MPs have been itching in order to take away numerous civil liberties since the early 1990s, when Tony Blair repeatedly outdid Michael Howard while Shadowing him at the Home Office.

As the great Neil Clark points out, respect for Christmas is an important litmus test of non-Christian regimes. This year, Syria and Iran passed that test, while Israel and Saudi Arabia failed it.

The American withdrawal from Syria has established the second pole in the post-post-Cold War world, a pole formed by Iran, Russia, China, India allied to Russia (yes, even now), Pakistan most emphatically allied to China, and so on.

That is further evident from the fact that the latest talks to bring the "Taliban" into the government of Afghanistan, thereby declaring the complete and utter pointlessness of the entire war there, are now underway in Tehran, of all places.

That would be all to the good, at least relatively speaking, if it were not for the ongoing plight of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Someone of sufficient prominence ought to board a plane to Tehran with his smartphone in his hand. Immediately before landing, he should tweet that he would not be leaving without her.

The cameras would be waiting for him, and he could bring her home. Why has this not already happened? Jeremy Corbyn should have done it months ago. He could then have got on with being the national and parliamentary Leader in Britain, and possibly the Leader throughout the West and beyond, of the people who understood the new balance of power in the world and who were determined to make it work in the right interests.

85 per cent of his own party's MPs would still have been hopeless on these issues, of course. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

I warmly welcome Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself "Tommy Robinson" but who would have to give his real name on the ballot paper, as the UKIP candidate for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham. Or, at any rate, as a candidate for this seat, of any party or none.

Either that, or he is running scared of the white working class. After all, I am mixed-race, and the sitting MP, who will presumably be the Labour candidate, has a mixed-race child. We are both impeccably middle-class (Google the house prices in Riding Mill, whence she hails), as the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat candidates will doubtless also be.

Rather magnanimously, considering how he became the Leader of Durham County Council in the first place, the Durham Miners' Association has permitted Simon "Third Generation Who's Who Entrants Are Above The Law" Henig to sit on the platform of the last two Durham Miners' Galas.

On both occasions, he has of course shared that platform with the principal speaker, Jeremy Corbyn. It is therefore the least to be expected that @SimonHenig will tweet the simple formula, ".@jeremycorbyn is not an anti-Semite." This post will appear here daily until that tweet has been posted.

Hilariously, the third attempt to put me on trial is due to begin on 1st April. That will be one year after the second failed attempt, and two years after I was charged.

The only purpose of this whole business has been to stop me from standing for Durham County Council (failed), to stop me from being elected (succeeded, because nothing else would have done), and to stop me from standing for Parliament (also doomed to fail, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign).

No one, absolutely no one at all, has ever suggested that I committed the acts alleged, or even that those acts ever really took place.

Specifically, until such time as they notify otherwise to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, then it is a matter of record that not only does every member of Durham County Council believe me to be innocent of the charges against me, but every member of Durham County Council believes that the acts alleged never happened in actual fact.

"I would never allow a Serb, a Jew or a Gypsy to marry into my family," declared Franjo Tudjman, whose statue has just been unveiled in Zagreb, the city where he recreated in the 1990s the full panoply of 1940s Fascism.

Tudjman denied the Holocaust, and his removal of the constitutional recognition of the Serbs as one of Croatia's two founding peoples led to the largest ethnic cleansing in the entire breakup of Yugoslavia. His statue now stands in the capital of a NATO and EU member-state.

Meanwhile, the border between Kosovo and Albania has been opened, as Greater Albania becomes a reality. Macedonia and Montenegro are next on the hit list. Montenegro, that is, that is now in NATO.

And Kosovo, that is, that NATO and the EU created, and which is the world's highest per capita source of IS jihadis, as well as the entry point for much of Europe's heroin and trafficked women, and as well as the key to the backstories of numerous unlicensed firearms on the streets of the United Kingdom.

Jeremy Corbyn opposed the war in Kosovo. But most Labour MPs and, so far as one can tell, all Conservatives still regard it as having been a "good" war. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and our people need to hold the balance of power in it.

Sunday, 30 December 2018

The latest in the field against Jeremy Corbyn is the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The what? You mean that that still exists? But didn't the Holocaust end 73 years ago? All of its perpetrators are dead, aren't they? Yes. Yes, of course it did. And yes, of course they are.

So today, rather than get jobs instead, the Simon Wiesenthal Center lucratively campaigns for such things as American recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which were no part of any Biblical Land of Israel, but where Israel now hosts a field hospital for its ally in the so-called Islamic State. You will recall that Priti Patel tried to divert British public funds to it.

And anyone who criticises or even questions any of this is literally a Nazi. Who says so? The Simon Wiesenthal Center says so. And you can't argue with that. Can you?

Alas, Corbyn himself does not feel able to do so. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and our people need to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

I warmly welcome Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself "Tommy Robinson" but who would have to give his real name on the ballot paper, as the UKIP candidate for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham. Or, at any rate, as a candidate for this seat, of any party or none.

Either that, or he is running scared of the white working class. After all, I am mixed-race, and the sitting MP, who will presumably be the Labour candidate, has a mixed-race child. We are both impeccably middle-class (Google the house prices in Riding Mill, whence she hails), as the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat candidates will doubtless also be.

Rather magnanimously, considering how he became the Leader of Durham County Council in the first place, the Durham Miners' Association has permitted Simon "Third Generation Who's Who Entrants Are Above The Law" Henig to sit on the platform of the last two Durham Miners' Galas.

On both occasions, he has of course shared that platform with the principal speaker, Jeremy Corbyn. It is therefore the least to be expected that @SimonHenig will tweet the simple formula, ".@jeremycorbyn is not an anti-Semite." This post will appear here daily until that tweet has been posted.

Hilariously, the third attempt to put me on trial is due to begin on 1st April. That will be one year after the second failed attempt, and two years after I was charged.

The only purpose of this whole business has been to stop me from standing for Durham County Council (failed), to stop me from being elected (succeeded, because nothing else would have done), and to stop me from standing for Parliament (also doomed to fail, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign).

No one, absolutely no one at all, has ever suggested that I committed the acts alleged, or even that those acts ever really took place.

Specifically, until such time as they notify otherwise to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, then it is a matter of record that not only does every member of Durham County Council believe me to be innocent of the charges against me, but every member of Durham County Council believes that the acts alleged never happened in actual fact.

Saturday, 29 December 2018

So said Dora Gaitskell in 1962 as the Labour Party Conference applauded her husband's Leader's Speech, in which he denounced potential entry into the European Communities as, "the end of a thousand years of history."

Much the same thing was written all over the face of Boris Johnson as the EU referendum result came in from Sunderland, and on the faces of Johnson, Michael Gove, and all the rest of that crowd for the rest of the night. All the "wrong" places had voted Leave, and as a result Leave had won.

Having earned their Brexit Brownie points, Remain would have suited them, and they undoubtedly voted for it. Leave on the votes of the "right" areas would have suited them less, but they could have lived with it.

They got neither. Instead, they got what those of us who were living in the "wrong" areas knew all along was going to happen: Leave as a rejection of 39 years of failure under all three parties, beginning with the Callaghan Government's turn to monetarism in 1977, the year of my birth.

Had we not voted in that way, then Remain would have won. We looked up our wealth and power at the point of accession in 1973, then we looked at our wealth and power in 2016, and the question answered itself. Had it not done so, then there would have been no Brexit.
Therefore, Brexit needs to suit us.

The anti-EU Right is now such a busted flush that it is reduced to crowing when a very longstanding MP who was briefly an undistinguished Minister a long time ago is knighted as a way of confirming that he will retire at the next General Election. Yes, at something as routine as that.

And if he has already been knighted, then might it be that there will be no peerage for a man who did once sit in the Cabinet? Do the people who think that they won Brexit now matter as little as that?

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and our people need to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

No, it just means that he is retiring. We could already have worked that out, and now it has effectively been announced. He has never really done anything, anyway.

That wing of the Conservative Party is finished. Leave won in exactly the wrong places to constitute anything other than a repudiation of 40 years of everything for which it had ever stood, it has just been defeated among Conservative MPs by a resounding two to one, its previously ubiquitous figures have accordingly disappeared from the airwaves, they are running scared of deselection by grassroots that are always fanatically loyal to whoever happens to be the Leader at the given time, and their Somewhere Else To Go has collapsed before everyone's very eyes.

All that, and their nearest thing to an éminence grise, although it is impossible to see how he ever came to be such a thing, has now been given the customary gold clock.

Any drone that might have been sighted was a Police one, looking for other drones. Do not take my word for that. The Chief Constable of Sussex has said so.

And do not let them take your drones, or anything else. Most Labour and almost all Conservative MPs have been itching to take away numerous civil liberties in the name of "security" since the early 1990s, when Tony Blair repeatedly outdid Michael Howard while Shadowing him at the Home Office.

I warmly welcome Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself "Tommy Robinson" but who would have to give his real name on the ballot paper, as the UKIP candidate for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham. Or, at any rate, as a candidate for this seat, of any party or none.

Either that, or he is running scared of the white working class. After all, I am mixed-race, and the sitting MP, who will presumably be the Labour candidate, has a mixed-race child. We are both impeccably middle-class (Google the house prices in Riding Mill, whence she hails), as the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat candidates will doubtless also be.

Rather magnanimously, considering how he became the Leader of Durham County Council in the first place, the Durham Miners' Association has permitted Simon "Third Generation Who's Who Entrants Are Above The Law" Henig to sit on the platform of the last two Durham Miners' Galas.

On both occasions, he has of course shared that platform with the principal speaker, Jeremy Corbyn. It is therefore the least to be expected that @SimonHenig will tweet the simple formula, ".@jeremycorbyn is not an anti-Semite." This post will appear here daily until that tweet has been posted.

Hilariously, the third attempt to put me on trial is due to begin on 1st April. That will be one year after the second failed attempt, and two years after I was charged.

The only purpose of this whole business has been to stop me from standing for Durham County Council (failed), to stop me from being elected (succeeded, because nothing else would have done), and to stop me from standing for Parliament (also doomed to fail, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign).

No one, absolutely no one at all, has ever suggested that I committed the acts alleged, or even that those acts ever really took place.

Specifically, until such time as they notify otherwise to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, then it is a matter of record that not only does every member of Durham County Council believe me to be innocent of the charges against me, but every member of Durham County Council believes that the acts alleged never happened in actual fact.

I have many friends in the Green Party, as in all of them. Like several of the others, they have been trying to recruit me for decades.

I have never voted for them for anything, but then they have never contested the elections to Lanchester Parish Council, where my highly ecumenical voting pattern corresponds closely to the final result.

But I am not a Green. I am a Red.

Look back to 1870, to each of what were to become the New Deal United States, Social Democratic Western Europe, and the Soviet Bloc. Then look at each of those in 1970.

Neither laissez-faire economics, nor caring overly much about the fate of rare voles, had delivered electrification, or mass transportation, or decent accommodation, or proper sanitation, or universal vaccination, or space exploration.

Are we to deny to Indians, or to Chinese, or to Brazilians, the same progress that we ourselves have made, and instead leave them defecating in communal pits while waiting to die of cholera or typhus?

Are we to have the women of Africa continue to die, as the women of Europe did for thousands of years, from the fumes emitted by the open fires over which they cooked?

This has nothing to do with post-imperial guilt, which is contestable. This has everything to do with common humanity, which is not.

If you hear echoes here of the debates around hunting or whaling, then, while I am not quite sure that I agree with you, I do take your point.

In Britain, at least, Greens and their fellow-travellers need to be asked the Yes-No question: "Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?"

Bringing us to the peculiar attempt by the Trump Wannabe Right to cast itself as the champion of coal.

Even in his own country, Donald Trump exists outside normal political categories. But I dare you to suggest bringing back the coal industry to anyone remotely on the Right over here.

Whereas the Left's biggest annual event is a colossal rally in that cause, organised by a continuity trade union with no other permanent political objective.

At this year's, a video message from Bernie Sanders had to be corrected immediately from the platform by Ian Lavery, the Chairman of the Labour Party and the former President of the National Union of Mineworkers.

He reiterated that party's commitment to the application of clean coal technology, not to the abandonment of fossil fuels. When Jeremy Corbyn rose to speak, then there was no correction to that correction.

As Piers Corbyn pointed out at the time, Margaret Thatcher started all of this, which she did, as an excuse to destroy the NUM.

All Conservatives still agree with her, and see the destruction of the British coal industry as one of their party's greatest ever achievements, for all that it has condemned us to endless wars over Arab oil, and possibly also over Russian gas.

Sadly, most Labour MPs would also never go near the Durham Miners' Gala, or even know what it was.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and our people need to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

“You brought your Irish parties into government, did you not?” Indeed, we did. “Preach what you practise.” Indeed, we should. The “Taliban” are coming into government, because that is how these things always end. Yes, always. Thereby rendering the entire war in Afghanistan completely and utterly pointless.

Precisely as many of us in the country at large, but only few valiant souls in Parliament such as Corbyn, have argued from the very start, and precisely as we predicted from the afternoon of 11th September 2001 onwards. But precisely as most Labour MPs, Peers and commentators, and almost all of their Conservative counterparts, will never, ever accept. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and our people need to hold the balance of power in it.

If you do not want our airports to be owned by the French, or our telecommunications and our nuclear power stations to be owned by the Chinese, or our rail and bus services to be owned by all and sundry, then you have to want us to own them for ourselves, as a country, as a State.

But all Conservative and most Labour MPs would become delirious at that suggestion. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

I warmly welcome Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself "Tommy Robinson" but who would have to give his real name on the ballot paper, as the UKIP candidate for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham. Or, at any rate, as a candidate for this seat, of any party or none.

Either that, or he is running scared of the white working class. After all, I am mixed-race, and the sitting MP, who will presumably be the Labour candidate, has a mixed-race child. We are both impeccably middle-class (Google the house prices in Riding Mill, whence she hails), as the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat candidates will doubtless also be.

Rather magnanimously, considering how he became the Leader of Durham County Council in the first place, the Durham Miners' Association has permitted Simon "Third Generation Who's Who Entrants Are Above The Law" Henig to sit on the platform of the last two Durham Miners' Galas.

On both occasions, he has of course shared that platform with the principal speaker, Jeremy Corbyn. It is therefore the least to be expected that @SimonHenig will tweet the simple formula, ".@jeremycorbyn is not an anti-Semite." This post will appear here daily until that tweet has been posted.

Hilariously, the third attempt to put me on trial is due to begin on 1st April. That will be one year after the second failed attempt, and two years after I was charged.

The only purpose of this whole business has been to stop me from standing for Durham County Council (failed), to stop me from being elected (succeeded, because nothing else would have done), and to stop me from standing for Parliament (also doomed to fail, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign).

No one, absolutely no one at all, has ever suggested that I committed the acts alleged, or even that those acts ever really took place.

Specifically, until such time as they notify otherwise to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, then it is a matter of record that not only does every member of Durham County Council believe me to be innocent of the charges against me, but every member of Durham County Council believes that the acts alleged never happened in actual fact.

Thursday, 27 December 2018

What the critics of Kate Osamor are really saying is that no one who lives in a council house should be an MP.

For 40 years, all three parties in government have run down social housing, flogged it off, refused to build any more, insisted that it was some kind of ambulance service for the extremely poor only, and stigmatised the people who lived in it.

That was the cutting edge of that approach to all public provision, for 40 years and counting, under all three parties in central government, and by all three parties in local government to this day, since the Right remains massively dominant of the municipal Labour Party.

And yes, of course the treatment of Osamor is racist. She is uppity, and must be lynched. The first purpose of racism is to pay politically black workers less, if anything. That is one of the two reasons why anti-Semitism, whatever else it may be, is not a form of racism, which is itself primarily a form of class oppression.

The other such reason is that Jews simply are not a race. Anyone can convert to Judaism, just as anyone can convert to Christianity or to Islam. Ivanka Trump is a convert to Judaism, and any Jew who "denies the God of Israel", classically by becoming a Christian, ceases to be Jewish according to the rabbis. But you cannot convert to or from being black.

Hating Jews as Jews is like hating Christians as Christians, or hating Muslims as Muslims. But it is not a form of racism.

Cressida Dick was given her job for her role in the coldblooded murder of Jean Charles de Menezes. Her improper forays into policy need to be understood in that light.

Not that I am anti-Police. I want justice in that case and in certain others going back decades, but the Police have always been on record that they would never have charged me, and they have always treated my fairly tiresome health needs with the utmost consideration. Moreover, they were entirely matter-of-fact that no drone had been sighted at Gatwick.

They were, that is, until the Deep State got on the blower. Lo and behold, the ever-critical BBC now dutifully reports that the number of drones had turned the sky black over Sussex and all surrounding counties. A ban on the private ownership of drones has been as good as announced, with further faithful old standbys from the "security" playbook to follow in short order.

They are quaking in the Forbidden City at the onslaught of the mighty Gavin Williamson.

What might Huawei be seeking to do in Britain? Rig the result of The X Factor? There is no Fu Manchu itching to read everybody's Snapchat messages about Love Island.

And since we are no longer even to own Gatwick Airport, then there is nothing else to read in Britain these days. How very conservative and patriotic privatisation and deregulation, Thatcherism and neoliberalism, have turned out to have been.

Yes, this is how the once-mighty but now decayed princely states of Asia and elsewhere felt as the British Empire approached. But approach it did. Like them, we can either get on the train, or we can expect to be thrown under it.

Who knows, subject to certain conditions, the Chinese and other rising powers of Eurasia, Asia, Latin America and Africa might even help us to take back control of our key infrastructure? The loss of that control does not concern the Secretary of State for Defence any more than it concerns the great majority of Labour MPs. But it should concern the rest of us.

No drone has been found to have had any connection to the events at Gatwick Airport, and left to themselves the Police were entirely clear about that. But then came the call from the people who had staged the whole thing in the first place.

Look out for a ban on private drone ownership, among other "security" measures that the people behind them have wanted since the days when Michael Howard was Home Secretary and Tony Blair, the only Leader acknowledged by 85 per cent of Labour MPs, was his much nastier Shadow.

I warmly welcome Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself "Tommy Robinson" but who would have to give his real name on the ballot paper, as the UKIP candidate for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham. Or, at any rate, as a candidate for this seat, of any party or none.

Either that, or he is running scared of the white working class. After all, I am mixed-race, and the sitting MP, who will presumably be the Labour candidate, has a mixed-race child. We are both impeccably middle-class (Google the house prices in Riding Mill, whence she hails), as the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat candidates will doubtless also be.

Rather magnanimously, considering how he became the Leader of Durham County Council in the first place, the Durham Miners' Association has permitted Simon "Third Generation Who's Who Entrants Are Above The Law" Henig to sit on the platform of the last two Durham Miners' Galas.

On both occasions, he has of course shared that platform with the principal speaker, Jeremy Corbyn. It is therefore the least to be expected that @SimonHenig will tweet the simple formula, ".@jeremycorbyn is not an anti-Semite." This post will appear here daily until that tweet has been posted.

Hilariously, the third attempt to put me on trial is due to begin on 1st April. That will be one year after the second failed attempt, and two years after I was charged.

The only purpose of this whole business has been to stop me from standing for Durham County Council (failed), to stop me from being elected (succeeded, because nothing else would have done), and to stop me from standing for Parliament (also doomed to fail, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign).

No one, absolutely no one at all, has ever suggested that I committed the acts alleged, or even that those acts ever really took place.

Specifically, until such time as they notify otherwise to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, then it is a matter of record that not only does every member of Durham County Council believe me to be innocent of the charges against me, but every member of Durham County Council believes that the acts alleged never happened in actual fact.

An immensely well-informed and well-connected friend has been in touch with the following:

I wouldn't necessarily believe a word I read in the capitalist media about Chinese policy in Xinjiang, having been there a few years ago and witnessed things for myself.

The provincial and Urumqi city administrative and party officials all spoke the Uyghur language as their first tongue, the Han-English translators we brought with us from Beijing did not speak it, so new Uyghur-English translators had to be found locally.

Wandering freely away from the hotel on market day, we heard Uyghur everywhere; its Turkic sounds are fundamentally different from the major Chinese languages.

All public signs were either in Uyghur alone, bilingual, the majority, or trilingual, since there is a long-established Russian minority there).

Within days of being back in Britain I read a report in The Guardian (where else?) of a speech to the EU parliament by the president of the US-based World Uyghur Congress.

It was about how all the top Xinjiang officials are non-Uyghurs, how the native language is forbidden and people are punished for speaking it in public, how all public signs are in Han only.

Of course Tony Blair ruled out a Coroner's Inquest onto the death of Dr David Kelly within minutes of the discovery of the body. But why leave this up to Blair?

A Chambers and Partners Band 1 legal practice is now on standby to pursue an action to bring about a Coroner's Inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly, an action before the International Criminal Court against those who had brought slavery back to Libya, and an action before the High Court of Justiciary of Scotland inviting it to exercise its declaratory power against Tony Blair and his accomplices in the aggression against Iraq in 2003.

All of these actions are to begin immediately upon my election to the House of Commons. As are the actions to bring about a Coroner's Inquest into the death of Dawn Sturgess, and to challenge the legality of the recent bombing of Syria after the confirmation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that no nerve agent had been used at Douma.

Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

I heard Professor Brian Cox on the radio this afternoon, in one breath endorsing the anti-industrial policy responses to climate change (not the science, but the policy responses), but in the next breath enthusing about the potential for our species from space exploration. As if it were possible to do both.

Yet this has become the political consensus of our age, at least among those who have passed the gatekeepers of approved opinion. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

With the death of Paddy Ashdown, consider that there will always be people, often very right-wing people, to whom the Conservative Party was just too public school, or too Southern, or too rural, and that there will always be people, often very left-wing people, to whom the Labour Party was just too public sector, or too Northern, or too urban.

Add in a cause from time to time, such as halting or reversing Brexit, and that will always be enough of a base for a viable minor major party. But would you really want that party to hold the balance of power in the hung Parliament that, having occurred at two of the last three General Elections, has already become the norm?

If Jeremy Hunt is serious in his opposition to the persecution of Christians, then he will stop doing Saudi Arabia's dirty work by taking out the regimes that, for all their many faults, do at least protect Christians, among other people, from those who literally cut out their hearts.

And he will denounce Israel for actively fighting in support of the so-called Islamic State, which never attacks it. That has nothing to do with any "deterrent". Fanatics are not deterred. Rather, let us recall that Priti Patel wanted to divert British public money to an IS field hospital in the Golan Heights. This is an alliance.

But Jeremy Hunt is not a courageous man. While it is good news about Abbas Edalat, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe still languishes in a cell in Iran on this, her fortieth birthday.

Unannounced, our dear Foreign Secretary, who clearly wants to be Prime Minister, ought to board a plane to Tehran with his smartphone in his hand. Immediately before landing, he should tweet that you would not be leaving without Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
The cameras would be waiting for him, and he could bring her home. Why has this not already happened?

As for the world's persecuted Christians, what could they expect if they lived in Britain? Fiona Onasanya could tell them, since, relatively speaking, they are likely to be of much her politics, much her theology, and much her skin colour. Take out any of those three aspects, and the Crown Prosecution Service would not have come after her, nor would the Labour Party have let it.

I do not like foxhunting, and I do not like the hunting ban. The latter was introduced by Tony Blair and Hilary Armstrong, neither of whom voted for it, in order to buy parliamentary support for the Iraq War. Those who call it "the miners' revenge" are giving up for the fight for the things that really would be.

Still, it is the law, and it ought at least to be enforced as such. Is there any other crime, relatively recently defined as such, that people are permitted to commit with complete impunity if they dress up in a funny costume and claim that their ancestors have been doing it for centuries?

You can only have an absolutely principled objection to hunting if you are a vegan, which I am certainly not. The same is true of whaling. How many people who are today complaining about both do not wear leather shoes? Or did not spend much of yesterday eating huge quantities of meat, often battery-produced poultry? Hunting, shooting, fishing and whaling are all a lot more humane than that.

How has it come to this, that the division is between people who think that a theoretical ban on hunting avenges the miners and excuses the Iraq War, all the while tucking into their own turkey, and people who think that the law simply does not apply to them, indulged in that view by the Police?

I warmly welcome Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself "Tommy Robinson" but who would have to give his real name on the ballot paper, as the UKIP candidate for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham. Or, at any rate, as a candidate for this seat, of any party or none.

Either that, or he is running scared of the white working class. After all, I am mixed-race, and the sitting MP, who will presumably be the Labour candidate, has a mixed-race child. We are both impeccably middle-class (Google the house prices in Riding Mill, whence she hails), as the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat candidates will doubtless also be.

Rather magnanimously, considering how he became the Leader of Durham County Council in the first place, the Durham Miners' Association has permitted Simon "Third Generation Who's Who Entrants Are Above The Law" Henig to sit on the platform of the last two Durham Miners' Galas.

On both occasions, he has of course shared that platform with the principal speaker, Jeremy Corbyn. It is therefore the least to be expected that @SimonHenig will tweet the simple formula, ".@jeremycorbyn is not an anti-Semite." This post will appear here daily until that tweet has been posted.

Hilariously, the third attempt to put me on trial is due to begin on 1st April. That will be one year after the second failed attempt, and two years after I was charged.

The only purpose of this whole business has been to stop me from standing for Durham County Council (failed), to stop me from being elected (succeeded, because nothing else would have done), and to stop me from standing for Parliament (also doomed to fail, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign).

No one, absolutely no one at all, has ever suggested that I committed the acts alleged, or even that those acts ever really took place.

Specifically, until such time as they notify otherwise to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, then it is a matter of record that not only does every member of Durham County Council believe me to be innocent of the charges against me, but every member of Durham County Council believes that the acts alleged never happened in actual fact.

Other than in certain historic cases such as one that is finally due to come to court next year, variations on the theme of "perverting the course of justice" are the cast iron proof that the Crown Prosecution Service has absolutely no evidence to back up the original charge, but is desperate for a conviction, very often of a political opponent.

Fiona Onasanya is a Corbyn supporter, she is the kind of Christian that dares to claim the Old Testament of Jesus Christ as the Old Testament of Jesus Christ, and she is a liberated black person such as might call out the hypocrisy of the New York or London Liberal Establishment over integration at home and over settler colonialism You Know Where.

Although he remains trapped in the anti-Chinese frenzy, inviting sympathy in Xinjiang for people, sometimes the same individuals and always with the same ideology, for whom he rightly excoriates support in Syria, Peter Hitchens writes:

I have made many enemies by refusing to join in the anti-Russian frenzy.

I was particularly scorned for pointing out that Britain’s pious attacks on the Russian bombing of Aleppo were ridiculous, given what Western forces were doing in cities ruled by Islamic State.

Now Anthony Loyd of The Times has visited Raqqa which, like Mosul, was shelled and bombed heavily by US and British forces, though the British Government has absurdly denied causing any civilian casualties there.

And he has found that Syrian workers recovering the dead say the vast majority of the remains being dug from the ruins are ‘those of civilians killed by coalition air strikes and artillery fire’.

Let’s hope that these facts will end the ridiculous moral posturing of the Western countries about Russia’s role in the Syrian war.

The real blame for all this misery lies in those Western countries.

By intervening first in Iraq and then in Libya and Syria, they transformed this whole region into a cauldron of war.

And they turned hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians into corpses, and millions into refugees and economic migrants.

The history of the British left is one of crises that promise victory but result in domination by the right.

In my lifetime I have lived through the stagflation of the ’70s, the miners’ strike in the ’80s, Black Tuesday in the ’90s and then the crash of 2008.

All seemed to promise radical change, yet this did not happen. On the contrary.
In response to successive democratic defeats, Labour adopted a strategy of the subordination of national democracy to finance capital and the European Union.

That describes the political economy of New Labour and its fatal inability to distinguish between globalisation and internationalism.

The free movement of labour, capital, goods and services, on which the European Union is based, is a vision of eternal capitalism in which it is illegal, by treaty law, to challenge the domination of finance within the economy.

While the unmediated movement of commodities through space was written in indelible ink with the seal of each member-state parliament, the “social chapter” was written in the lightest of pencil.

The alignment of the progressive left with the EU was its greatest delusion and has led to the progressive weakening of every socialist party that has pursued this goal.

We are witnessing its palsy across the continent.

It is still the case that opposition to this is denigrated within the mainstream of progressive thought as populist, nationalist, racist and xenophobic.

The false promise of Jacques Delors corrupted the praxis of two generations of Labour and trade union leaders.

The primacy of democracy as the principal practice through which to resist the commodification of human beings and nature, which is the fundamental process of capitalism, is the real meaning of Brexit for the left.

Brexit is the real deal and offers the possibility for socialists to lead a political transformation that can redefine the meaning and practices of the nation.

It breaks the stranglehold of the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties and the enforcement of rules by the European Court of Justice over the single market and the customs union.

It makes our politics possible. Leaving the EU is a necessary condition of a democratic socialist politics. That is the starting point of this argument.

Brexit is also a cause that can unite all of the different currents of left-wing thought that hold democracy as their core belief.

The organisation and articulation of a constructive alternative to the status quo, a politics that would be illegal under EU law, is a necessary part of this.

The Brexit negotiations are an object lesson on how democracy is subordinated to capital and we should use it to educate, agitate and organise around a renewal of democracy and the primacy of politics.

The left needs to lead the politics of Brexit, not endure it in a defensive crouch in which “but” is the most important word when “respecting” the referendum result.

The inability of the Labour leadership to make the argument for Brexit and democracy, to lead the renewal of democratic sovereignty and articulate clearly the possibilities that leaving the EU open up for the democratisation of the economy and the redistribution of power and assets in our society is extremely unfortunate.

It offers no way out of the interregnum that we are living through. Rather it opens the space for the right to claim democratic sovereignty as its own.

We need to disrupt the dynamics that have taken a grip since the referendum result which have focused on the “deal” and stigmatised “hard” Brexit and “crashing out” in favour of the endless accumulation of details.

We need to leave the EU and concentrate on pursuing a national renewal based upon democracy and the dignity of labour, a defence of freedom and humanity from the iron cage of Napoleonic directives and Thatcherite economics that the EU has become. It is not a “cliff edge.”

Antonio Gramsci defined an interregnum as a time “when the old is dead and the new cannot be born … when there is a fraternisation of opposites and all kinds of morbid symptoms pertain.”

It is as good a description of our time as I have found.

It makes sense of the spectacle of a Remain Prime Minister who claims to represent Brexit and a Leave Labour leader who has become the tribune of the hopes of Remain.

The first demand of capitalism as a system is the removal of its fundamental practices from democratic or political “interference.”

The internal imperative to maximum returns on investment in the shortest period of time leads to an enormous pressure of commodification and the monetisation of relationships and institutions.

“Everything solid melts into air and all that is sacred is profaned.” It is an inhumane system that is merciless and relentless in its pursuit of profit.

It can lead to a nasty politics, of which fascism was the demonic form or a democratic politics, of which socialism is the sublime form.

What is impossible is the avoidance of any kind of politics at all and that is what the EU represents. It sets such strong parameters on what can be democratically decided as to be considered a menace to democracy itself.

Capitalism is based on the price system, which in turn is based on fluctuation, and when applied to the substance of society, human beings and their natural environment, it leads to the relentless discombobulation of the stability required to lead and live a life in which monetary concerns are not primary.

Democratic politics requires some shelter from this market storm and if we don’t provide it others will. That is what is at stake in this interregnum.

It can go either way and we have the resources from within our tradition of analysis and political organisation to win the argument and to put together the class and cultural alliances required to secure a democratic victory.

What are the forms of the Brexit crisis and why is it so serious?

I would suggest that it brings together an economic, political and cultural set of contradictions into a systematic crisis of legitimacy for the ruling class.

The economic crisis is the first and relates back to the financial crash of 2008.

In a lightning flash of clarity it was apparent that the wealth of the nation had been lost in a frenzy of speculation, cheating and exaggeration and that the golden goose of the City of London had been fouling its nest all along.

The City has been at the hub of global maritime trade for half a millennium and the actual country has increasingly become a costly appendage.

As a set of institutions, including the Corporation of the City of London and all the leading financial corporations, they supported Remain.
Brexit was supported more by farmers, landowners and those with assets that were less fungible.

The strategy of finance capital is to maintain its ability to invest globally without interference from internal politics, the stress being on “frictionless” trade.

It pursues staying in the single market and the customs union while ditching the commitments to environmental and labour regulations.

It is important to remember that 85 per cent of our economic activity is outside the “global” economy and serves local needs.

An economy that serves the many and not the few requires a democratic polity that ensures that the interests of the City do not dominate the state.

Tories such as Jacob Rees-Mogg are doing the work of socialism by supporting the primacy of democratic sovereignty.

His hope is that the politics that emerges will be laissez-faire on economics and conservative on social and cultural issues without recognising the contradiction between those two commitments.

He hopes that his hedge fund will uphold enclosure but the political space of Brexit opens up the restoration of the Commons.

His is a politics that we can defeat after March 29 and is a prefigurement of the politics of the future. The Commons against the hedge funds.

The political crisis is that our ruling class, including the Civil Service and Parliament, setting aside the hysteria that pervades academia on this issue, has proved incapable of acting upon the referendum result and sustaining the politics of leaving the EU.

Their only vision is more of the same. They have concentrated all their effort on the details of policy which end with us staying within the constraints of Lisbon and Maastricht. This leads to a crisis of legitimacy for our rulers which we should accentuate and exacerbate.

Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are clear about the changes they wish to make, but are opaque in their failure to admit that such reforms are illegal under EU law. This is the most grievous symptom of the crisis of legitimacy.

Party management has taken precedence over political leadership and the result is the stasis of the interregnum in which Labour is unable to seize the moment.

This leads to the temptation to extend Article 50, delay the moment of reckoning and to let the moment pass.

The legitimacy crisis of the ruling class will then extend to the Labour Party and then the morbid symptoms will really kick in.

The cultural crisis is the most difficult for the left and for the coalition we need to build.

That is because the socialist tradition of which I am a part thinks that we are social beings, that we are constituted by unchosen traditions such as language, relationships and religions that are part of an inheritance.

We are not defined as individual choosers or as acquisitive individuals motivated entirely by self-interest, narrowly defined.

In contrast our sociability leads to a culture built around reciprocity, mutuality and collective democratic decision and these were the forms of the early labour movement and is what we often refer to as a culture.

This forms the basis of what EP Thomson called a moral economy.

There is a part of the left that rejects this and views the very idea of a person is a socially constructed entity who can only be emancipated by a heroic liberalism of individual self-definition.

This argument can only be resolved politically and is something we can look forward to renewing after we have left the EU.

In the meantime there is enough common interest on the issues of class and democracy to co-operate in pursuing that outcome of Brexit and the restoration of democratic sovereignty.

The cultural crisis of Brexit is the distance between the liberal assumptions of the rulers and enduring ethics of the moral economy held by the ruled.

Brexit is a class issue.
The immediate task before us is to leave the EU and to break the constraints on democracy that it represents while articulating a political and economic programme that can fill the spaces it leaves behind.

An industrial policy that favours workers and neglected regions. A reform of banking to restore assets to abandoned places.

A democracy, locational and vocational, that can resist the domination of the rich and the educationally qualified.

No deal is the real deal and the left should unite in pursuit of that end. You might call it government of the people, by the people and for the people.